4 thoughts on “Re: Arctic Sea Ice”

1. The real prob­lem with the global warm­ing “debate” is that you’ve been suck­ered into think­ing that I (and oth­ers who share my belief) am “just so set in their beliefs that they con­sider any­one who dis­agrees with their stance as an ‘idiot.’”

   I do think that it’s idi­otic to take two momen­tary val­ues and use them to imply what the trend is and what we *might* expect in the future. This is espe­cially true when a *real* trend analy­sis demon­strates exactly the oppo­site conclusion.

   The impres­sion given by the Dailytech post is com­pletely false. If they know any­thing about trend analy­sis, then they’re out­right lying to you. If they don’t, they’ve got no busi­ness pon­tif­i­cat­ing about the impli­ca­tion of sea ice for global warm­ing. You read my post. Do you disagree?

   When sites like Dailytech (and boing­bo­ing) post patently false, eas­ily proven wrong mis­in­for­ma­tion, then are called out on it — that’s when they scream “foul” and claim that the cli­mate sci­ence com­mu­nity sti­fles debate and squashes dis­agree­ment. They might as well post that the earth is flat, and when they’re shown the error of their ways whine about how “round-earthers sti­fle debate.”

   There are lots of aspects of cli­mate sci­ence worth debate. The trend in sea ice is not one of them.

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2. It may be per­ti­nent to under­stand that Tamino is a proper bona-fide sta­tis­ti­cian with a badge and a cer­tifi­cate and every­thing. He knows what he is talk­ing about in this instance and you could do worse than lis­ten to him.

   The Boing Boing arti­cle is unfor­tu­nately very mis­lead­ing, both in the mate­r­ial and also with poten­tial to fur­ther mis­lead those who are will­ing to be mis­lead, want to mis­lead oth­ers or sim­ply lack exper­tise in cli­mate sci­ence or sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis (which is prob­a­bly most of Boing Boing’s audience).

   Let’s look at the mate­r­ial error first of all. It’s a short arti­cle with only one proper sen­tence in it so it shouldn’t take long.

   “Based on satel­lite obser­va­tions, the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center reports that the amount of sea ice on the planet is the high­est in 29 years, when satel­lite record-keeping began.”

   Umm, no they don’t. UIACRC have said no such thing, the source of the arti­cle (Daily Tech) says no such thing and it is dif­fi­cult to see how any such inter­pre­ta­tion could be made look­ing at the sup­plied graph. I’m sure it’s an inno­cent mis­take by Boing Boing, but any­one read­ing the arti­cle think­ing that extent of sea ice on the planet is at it’s high­est in 29 years and believe that such a claim is reli­ably sourced would have been mis­lead. Sea Ice is cat­e­gor­i­cally not at it’s high­est in 29 years.

   Let’s take a quick look at the poten­tial for fur­ther misleadability.

   The rest of the arti­cle con­sists of a quote. A cur­sory glance might lead you to attribute the infor­ma­tion in the quote to Bill Chapman from the UIACRC, but care­ful read­ing reveals no such thing. The open­ing line of the quote “Earlier this year, pre­dic­tions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a sub­stan­tial recov­ery.” was made not by Bill Chapman but by Daily Tech, who have craftily posi­tioned Bill Chapmans expla­na­tion of the events next to their own spu­ri­ous descrip­tion of events in order to make them appear associated.

   Surely Daily Tech would not stoop so low! Oh I’m afraid they do, reg­u­larly. Stooping low is the grist in Daily Tech’s mill. Follow the Boing Boing linky to the source.

   “In May, con­cerns over dis­ap­pear­ing sea ice led the U.S. to offi­cially list the polar bear a threat­ened species, over objec­tions from experts who claimed the animal’s num­bers were increasing.”

   Notice how those who have called for pro­tec­tion don’t qual­ify as ‘experts’ — curi­ously Daily Tech’s eth­i­cal pol­icy promises keep its arti­cles “unbi­ased and accu­rate” — yeah right!

   By the way, one con­cern over melt­ing sea ice is that the albedo (wikipedia is your friend) of the planet is reduced. Ice is white and reflects solar radi­a­tion rather than absorb­ing it. Cold water par­tic­u­larly is dark blue absorb­ing more solar energy; it’s an exam­ple of one of those pos­i­tive feed back loops that threaten to take global warm­ing closer to cli­mate change.

   People should be able to refer to pop­u­lar web­sites and expect a degree of fac­tu­al­ity and accu­racy in the report­ing. Faulty report­ing, whether per­ni­cious such as in Daily Tech’s case or through a lack of care and atten­tion in Boing Boing’s can lead to con­fu­sion and the unhelp­ful impres­sion that the sci­ence sur­round­ing cli­mate change is less cer­tain than it actu­ally is. It also means that some of us waste end­less hours try­ing to set the facts straight when rumors of a record Arctic recov­ery spread like wild­fire (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner/blog/2009/01/07/global_warming_al_gores_convenient_untruth_freezes_over) and peo­ple unfor­tu­nately think their mis­taken points of view are backed up by a reli­able sources of infor­ma­tion. That’s time we don’t get back.

   All the best,
   Jay.

   Reply

3. 1. I have not been “suck­ered into think­ing” that you char­ac­ter­ize those who dis­agree as idiots. You said as much in your post when you wrote that: “You can see that there might be a down­ward trend, and any idiot (well, appar­ently not any idiot).” Either I mis­in­ter­preted your use of “idiot” (which is a pretty loaded word regard­less of inter­pre­ta­tion) or you do see those that view sea ice as recov­er­ing as those “idiots” that can­not see the down­ward trend.

   2. I did not read the Dailytech post, but I cer­tainly did read the Boing Boing one and to say that Boing Boing posted a “patently false” post is just wrong. They were not claim­ing that the trend was an upward one. Perhaps the orig­i­nal report that they took a quote from claimed such, but nowhere in Boing Boing’s arti­cle did they claim any­thing of the sort. They were sim­ply report­ing that as of the cur­rent moment sea ice lev­els are at their high­est since 1979. They were not claim­ing that the aver­age was higher, nor that the trend was upward; they were sim­ply claim­ing that at this moment it is higher. Did you read their post? Do you disagree?

   3. I did read your post and I do agree that melt­ing ice is a prob­lem but I think I dis­agree with how you are going about your analy­sis. If you want to make the argu­ment indis­putable then show a causal rela­tion­ship. I agree with your post in prin­ci­ple, but I think that it’s impor­tant in an arti­cle that is tak­ing a dis­tinct side to show why such a stance is cor­rect. Don’t sim­ply write the other side off and berate them for inter­pret­ing data in a flawed way (which it cer­tainly was). Show how Boing Boing, Dailytech, etc. are wrong and then describe why this kind of faulty sci­ence is prob­lem­atic. Explain why it is impor­tant to prop­erly inter­pret sea ice lev­els. What I would like to see (which I have had a hard time find­ing) is an argu­ment that states some direct con­se­quences of melt­ing sea ice. What is it exactly that melt­ing sea ice causes?

   Thank you for your com­ment and I hope that you don’t believe me to be the type of per­son who dis­re­gards all dis­cus­sion of the envi­ron­ment and global warm­ing as crazy. I do truly believe that it is a prob­lem that needs to be addressed. I just dis­agree with many in the com­mu­nity about how and through what mea­sures it ought to be addressed.

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4. Thanks for the com­ment Jay. This was the kind of dis­sec­tion of Daily Tech’s claim that I was look­ing for. Instead of pro­duc­ing con­tra­dict­ing fig­ures and sim­ply say­ing that Boing Boing and Daily Tech are wrong you went through and showed where they were wrong, and how they mis­in­ter­preted quotes, etc. Thanks.

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